Just as a price point, picked up 2x e5-2660's (SR0KK) yesterday for $57/ea shipped via OBO. This chip has been mentioned in this thread a couple of times... marginally slower than the e5-2670, 95W TDP vs 115W. I think it's all a binning game, but want to see if it impacts temps in my setup to swap them.
You'll save ~40W or so in a dual processor system. The TDP is ultimately enforced by the motherboard and sets how much power the CPU can draw.
You're really making me rethink my PSU choice.
This thread over at Freenas forums made me want to err on the side of larger, but your max draw seems lower than I would've feared. What PSU are you using? Thank you.
Well, generally speaking it's hard to go too large, but if your system has a very light draw you could end up using a large supply where it's inefficient. However, a dual CPU E5 system doesn't have what would be considered a very light draw, even at idle unless you're look at a 1000+W supply.
Anyone has recommendations for a desktop board? Thinking of putting some of my spare E5s for a new desktop.
Supermicro X9SRA or
ASRock Rack EPC602D8A. Both are still available from Newegg. Otherwise get into a bidding war on eBay for a used x79 board. Those two options aren't as expensive as you might think at a system level since they can use the cheap registered ECC DIMMs that are all over eBay whereas an x79 board needs standard unregistered DIMMs that cost more, a lot more if you want unregistered ECC DIMMs.
I went with a Supermicro X9SRA myself and am now fighting with the fan thresholds. The 140mm fans I'm using spin too slowly in the motherboard's opinion so it gets stuck in a an endless "pumping" cycle of hitting them with 100% PWM when they run to slow until they speed up enough, then thermal control takes over, they spin down, they run to slow, get hit with 100% PWM, etc. I'm in the process of building a small hardware solution to the problem because Supermicro likes to keep things in the BIOS very sparse. If you're using fans that stay above 800RPM (I think) you should be okay.